8 ms·

Learnings of a CEO: Wade Foster, Zapier

165 points by alexzeitler 4y ago

mdorazio 4y ago
If nothing else, this interview shows that massive venture funding and hiring bonanzas are not the only way to build a successful company. I feel like that message gets lost too often in the startup sphere.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  No but it's much harder to compete when your competitors are fueled by nearly unlimited VC money. They can pay better compensation, hire more people, have lower prices and so on.
  - code_biologist 4y ago
    The combo of more and better people is really a one two punch of being well funded.
- pbreit 4y ago
  With n=1, not sure if conclusive.
  - qbasic_forever 4y ago
    Atlassian bootstrapped to a billion dollar public company without any VC: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-atlassian-bootstrapped-from-0-to-50m-arr-with-over-20k-customers-in-just-8-years-37be88deef https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-atlassian-bootstrapped...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - asdff 4y ago
      Yeah 20 years ago shortly after .com blowup. Try that today and it will be more difficult for many reasons, namely there now exist VCs that will look to fund your competitors. There would be no Jira. There would be some better product made by amazon that everyone is using.
      - xref 4y ago
        I went from the highest-high at “no jira” to the lowest low at “product made by Amazon”
    - HaZeust 4y ago
      These are noteworthy articles because of how rare it is - akin to articles of Silicon Valley titans that didn't complete college. We point to their experience as novelty, not as practical advice to ourselves or others.
phren0logy 4y ago
Can we just never say "learnings" again, please?
- criddell 4y ago
  The article contains five learnings.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Is that an official ask?
  - Loughla 4y ago
    The issue here is that we have the evaluate the impact of boiling that ocean. Is it a robust, punt of an appropriate learning? Should we reach out and leverage that decision to ensure we're giving 110% before we sent it over the wall? Best practice, the bleeding edge of best practice, is to empower employees. There are far too many moving parts to avoid the low-hanging fruit. One of our core competencies is leveraging out of pocket individuals to avoid jumping the shark, because as we all know, when it's time to make hay, make hay. Just some blue sky thinking from our last thought shower is to drill down into our core values before sending the key takeaways over to our tiger team. That way, the S.W.A.T. team can make sure we're not moving the goalposts. What we really need is the bandwidth to gain traction on this aha moment ensuring this becomes a game changer, not just short term. We need to bring to the table any mission critical silver bullets, while keeping our stakeholders in the loop. In the end, we should consider trimming the fat, hard stop. I hate business lingo, and it's everywhere. Constant.
    - thatnerdyguy 4y ago
      Can we double-click into that?
      - 4y ago
RyanShook 4y ago
Can we watch the feedback course Wade teaches? This is an important topic that I’ve found varies greatly from manager to manager and would appreciate a framework.
howmayiannoyyou 4y ago
Zapier. Brilliant when it started and good for small integrations today. I say that as a heavy user. Not brilliant and torturous with complex integrations due to the linear zap creation UI in my view. Doesn't handle failed connections well in my opinion. Integromat's object UI is much easier to work with (but also far from perfect).
alexpotato 4y ago
These types of blog posts/articles always make me curious: How were these people able to transition from founders of a tiny company to successfully running and managing large (people or revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before so how did they figure out what to do and how to do it? I often think of Zuckerberg or the Collison brothers as examples. They hadn't done anything like this before so how did it work out for them? - Is it survivor bias? - Were the ideas and the execution so good at the beginning that once the company was up and running it didn't matter if they made mistakes? - Did they have excellent advisors/mentors? If so, how did they know who to listen to? (I think of the scene in The Social Network where Justin Timberlake advises Jesse Eisenberg to go in wearing pyjamas to a VC meeting) - First mover advantage? (not the case for FB or Stripe as far as I can tell) All of the above comes from reading this article: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-groupon.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-grou... In it, Andrew Mason talks about how Groupon "followed the data" into offering more and more deals to the point that they imploded the company. He, like Zuck and the Collisons, had never done this before and seemed intelligent and was acting in good faith. Yet things went south for him. Genuinely curious to hear people's responses.
- tmpz22 4y ago
  Once you have even a small amount (say $500k) of perceived success you find yourself meeting "helpers" constantly, people who want to mentor you, people who want to be your friend, and magically all these people want something from you. As your perceived worth goes up you start meeting more "interesting" people who want to help more, and of course they ultimately want something more from you. So you eventually have a big network through this process, and at a certain level its not even about trading favors, but trading the potential for a favor. And with this support group you can answer almost any question, market trends, merger opportunities, fund raising access, its all there for you.
- silexia 4y ago
  As someone who has also successfully done this, I think it is a matter of experience. You make mistakes and learn from them. Lots of BSers get hired into executive positions, it's best to simply do it and learn yourself along the way.
dwb 4y ago
The word is “lessons”.
kzh_ 4y ago
Wade gave a memorable talk during our YC batch. When asked how he ran Zapier remotely, which was unusual at the time, he said something along the lines of "When I want to talk with the team, I open Slack. When I want to file a support ticket, I open Zendesk." Ironically, we were the last in-person batch that was cut short by COVID, so his comments turned out to be quite helpful.
clement_b 4y ago
Zapier's impact in the broader ecosystem isn't unlike AWS' in the sense that it has enabled so many orgs to build faster without the hassle (connectors, APIs, event processing, ...). I wonder how many startups got where they are now thanks to good old Zapier-based workflows built by sales ops & marketing teams keen/forced to bypass eng :) Kudos to the team; What a success this is!
zkid18 4y ago
Curious, how does hn community use Zapier? I tried it couple of times, but it's tough to build anything sophisticated there than basic trigger-based scenarios Imo, integromat (make.com) or n8n are way more powerful.
- soared 4y ago
  As a no code but very technical person zapier is incredible. I’ve posted about it before but in the adtech world a lot of people are technical but don’t code and automate lots of tasks/integrations/alerts/ etc with zapier.
sharps_xp 4y ago
I cannot imagine they are getting a good return on 700 people weekly all hands meetings..
- epolanski 4y ago
  Yeah, like, who's gonna seriously follow those? One in ten? PMs and POs? I honestly think that in all the companies I've been the all hands should've been a 5 minute read email, rather than yet another meeting that is splitting my day.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Many people I know use those meetings to workout or take care of chores. You don't have to sit there and be mad your time is being wasted, go ahead and make use of it if your manager is leaving you idle.
    - epolanski 4y ago
      Sure but still, as I'm doing work that requires concentration splitting my morning or afternoon is something I can't fully make up by doing side activities.
victor106 4y ago
> because of Zapier’s network effect on our developer platform side what exactly is Zapiers network effect?
- Irishsteve 4y ago
  Adding a new app to their platform. As that app gets more popular in general, if Zapier has it, there is a higher proportion of individuals that want to get data into / out of that app. So along comes Zapier.
nlstitch 4y ago
hmm, too bad, nothing about holacracy / self steering teams, how it failed them and what they learned from that.
- johnny_canuck 4y ago
  What is the context here?
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
    I imagine they're referring to the fad around 2012 that a lot of people in the startup space fell into: startup people with no experience building and running teams suddenly thinking that they are part of a new transformational movement of flat self-organizing.. organizations. Things were never going to be the same again, a complete revolution in human organization. Except a few years later everybody who tried it rolled things back and realized there was a reason for hierarchy to have existed for thousands of years. It turns out that the reason that works for Valve is because Valve is sitting on a money printer and they're successful despite the free-for-all nature of the org, not because of it. It's reminiscent of people cargo-culting the Google dev interview, thinking there's a causal relationship there between Google being successful and their interviewing practices. I'm guessing the OP is implying that Zapier fell for that fad and should be talking about their experience with it.
- wussboy 4y ago
  That was Zappos. I was wondering the same thing as you.
10g1k 4y ago
- slater 4y ago
  Take it up with 1484 AD: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnings https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnings
musicale 4y ago
I still dislike "learnings" - even if though is attested in the 14th century and I'm perfectly happy with "teachings." I greatly prefer "lessons" or even "lessons learned" (or "lessons learnt" if you're outside of the US.)
yaseer 4y ago
There's a popular misconception on HN that YC is all about VC funding. I used to think this too, before doing YC and realising YC emphasise funding as a tool, not as a goal. You raise as much as you need to achieve your goals. Zapier really embody that lesson writ large - they didn't take additional funding because they didn't need to. I hope their success emphasises that lesson.

165 points by alexzeitler 4y ago

If nothing else, this interview shows that massive venture funding and hiring bonanzas are not the only way to build a successful company. I feel like that message gets lost too often in the startup sphere.

marcinzm 4y ago
No but it's much harder to compete when your competitors are fueled by nearly unlimited VC money. They can pay better compensation, hire more people, have lower prices and so on.
- code_biologist 4y ago
  The combo of more and better people is really a one two punch of being well funded.
pbreit 4y ago
With n=1, not sure if conclusive.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Atlassian bootstrapped to a billion dollar public company without any VC: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-atlassian-bootstrapped-from-0-to-50m-arr-with-over-20k-customers-in-just-8-years-37be88deef https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-atlassian-bootstrapped...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - asdff 4y ago
    Yeah 20 years ago shortly after .com blowup. Try that today and it will be more difficult for many reasons, namely there now exist VCs that will look to fund your competitors. There would be no Jira. There would be some better product made by amazon that everyone is using.
    - xref 4y ago
      I went from the highest-high at “no jira” to the lowest low at “product made by Amazon”
  - HaZeust 4y ago
    These are noteworthy articles because of how rare it is - akin to articles of Silicon Valley titans that didn't complete college. We point to their experience as novelty, not as practical advice to ourselves or others.

phren0logy 4y ago

Can we just never say "learnings" again, please?

criddell 4y ago
The article contains five learnings.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sokoloff 4y ago
Is that an official ask?
- Loughla 4y ago
  The issue here is that we have the evaluate the impact of boiling that ocean. Is it a robust, punt of an appropriate learning? Should we reach out and leverage that decision to ensure we're giving 110% before we sent it over the wall? Best practice, the bleeding edge of best practice, is to empower employees. There are far too many moving parts to avoid the low-hanging fruit. One of our core competencies is leveraging out of pocket individuals to avoid jumping the shark, because as we all know, when it's time to make hay, make hay. Just some blue sky thinking from our last thought shower is to drill down into our core values before sending the key takeaways over to our tiger team. That way, the S.W.A.T. team can make sure we're not moving the goalposts. What we really need is the bandwidth to gain traction on this aha moment ensuring this becomes a game changer, not just short term. We need to bring to the table any mission critical silver bullets, while keeping our stakeholders in the loop. In the end, we should consider trimming the fat, hard stop. I hate business lingo, and it's everywhere. Constant.
  - thatnerdyguy 4y ago
    Can we double-click into that?
    - 4y ago

RyanShook 4y ago

Can we watch the feedback course Wade teaches? This is an important topic that I’ve found varies greatly from manager to manager and would appreciate a framework.

howmayiannoyyou 4y ago

Zapier. Brilliant when it started and good for small integrations today. I say that as a heavy user. Not brilliant and torturous with complex integrations due to the linear zap creation UI in my view. Doesn't handle failed connections well in my opinion. Integromat's object UI is much easier to work with (but also far from perfect).

alexpotato 4y ago

These types of blog posts/articles always make me curious: How were these people able to transition from founders of a tiny company to successfully running and managing large (people or revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before so how did they figure out what to do and how to do it? I often think of Zuckerberg or the Collison brothers as examples. They hadn't done anything like this before so how did it work out for them? - Is it survivor bias? - Were the ideas and the execution so good at the beginning that once the company was up and running it didn't matter if they made mistakes? - Did they have excellent advisors/mentors? If so, how did they know who to listen to? (I think of the scene in The Social Network where Justin Timberlake advises Jesse Eisenberg to go in wearing pyjamas to a VC meeting) - First mover advantage? (not the case for FB or Stripe as far as I can tell) All of the above comes from reading this article: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-groupon.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-grou... In it, Andrew Mason talks about how Groupon "followed the data" into offering more and more deals to the point that they imploded the company. He, like Zuck and the Collisons, had never done this before and seemed intelligent and was acting in good faith. Yet things went south for him. Genuinely curious to hear people's responses.

tmpz22 4y ago
Once you have even a small amount (say $500k) of perceived success you find yourself meeting "helpers" constantly, people who want to mentor you, people who want to be your friend, and magically all these people want something from you. As your perceived worth goes up you start meeting more "interesting" people who want to help more, and of course they ultimately want something more from you. So you eventually have a big network through this process, and at a certain level its not even about trading favors, but trading the potential for a favor. And with this support group you can answer almost any question, market trends, merger opportunities, fund raising access, its all there for you.
silexia 4y ago
As someone who has also successfully done this, I think it is a matter of experience. You make mistakes and learn from them. Lots of BSers get hired into executive positions, it's best to simply do it and learn yourself along the way.

dwb 4y ago

The word is “lessons”.

kzh_ 4y ago

Wade gave a memorable talk during our YC batch. When asked how he ran Zapier remotely, which was unusual at the time, he said something along the lines of "When I want to talk with the team, I open Slack. When I want to file a support ticket, I open Zendesk." Ironically, we were the last in-person batch that was cut short by COVID, so his comments turned out to be quite helpful.

clement_b 4y ago

Zapier's impact in the broader ecosystem isn't unlike AWS' in the sense that it has enabled so many orgs to build faster without the hassle (connectors, APIs, event processing, ...). I wonder how many startups got where they are now thanks to good old Zapier-based workflows built by sales ops & marketing teams keen/forced to bypass eng :) Kudos to the team; What a success this is!

zkid18 4y ago

Curious, how does hn community use Zapier? I tried it couple of times, but it's tough to build anything sophisticated there than basic trigger-based scenarios Imo, integromat (make.com) or n8n are way more powerful.

soared 4y ago
As a no code but very technical person zapier is incredible. I’ve posted about it before but in the adtech world a lot of people are technical but don’t code and automate lots of tasks/integrations/alerts/ etc with zapier.

sharps_xp 4y ago

I cannot imagine they are getting a good return on 700 people weekly all hands meetings..

epolanski 4y ago
Yeah, like, who's gonna seriously follow those? One in ten? PMs and POs? I honestly think that in all the companies I've been the all hands should've been a 5 minute read email, rather than yet another meeting that is splitting my day.
- asdff 4y ago
  Many people I know use those meetings to workout or take care of chores. You don't have to sit there and be mad your time is being wasted, go ahead and make use of it if your manager is leaving you idle.
  - epolanski 4y ago
    Sure but still, as I'm doing work that requires concentration splitting my morning or afternoon is something I can't fully make up by doing side activities.

victor106 4y ago

> because of Zapier’s network effect on our developer platform side what exactly is Zapiers network effect?

Irishsteve 4y ago
Adding a new app to their platform. As that app gets more popular in general, if Zapier has it, there is a higher proportion of individuals that want to get data into / out of that app. So along comes Zapier.

nlstitch 4y ago

hmm, too bad, nothing about holacracy / self steering teams, how it failed them and what they learned from that.

johnny_canuck 4y ago
What is the context here?
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  I imagine they're referring to the fad around 2012 that a lot of people in the startup space fell into: startup people with no experience building and running teams suddenly thinking that they are part of a new transformational movement of flat self-organizing.. organizations. Things were never going to be the same again, a complete revolution in human organization. Except a few years later everybody who tried it rolled things back and realized there was a reason for hierarchy to have existed for thousands of years. It turns out that the reason that works for Valve is because Valve is sitting on a money printer and they're successful despite the free-for-all nature of the org, not because of it. It's reminiscent of people cargo-culting the Google dev interview, thinking there's a causal relationship there between Google being successful and their interviewing practices. I'm guessing the OP is implying that Zapier fell for that fad and should be talking about their experience with it.
wussboy 4y ago
That was Zappos. I was wondering the same thing as you.

10g1k 4y ago

slater 4y ago
Take it up with 1484 AD: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnings https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/learnings

musicale 4y ago

I still dislike "learnings" - even if though is attested in the 14th century and I'm perfectly happy with "teachings." I greatly prefer "lessons" or even "lessons learned" (or "lessons learnt" if you're outside of the US.)

yaseer 4y ago

There's a popular misconception on HN that YC is all about VC funding. I used to think this too, before doing YC and realising YC emphasise funding as a tool, not as a goal. You raise as much as you need to achieve your goals. Zapier really embody that lesson writ large - they didn't take additional funding because they didn't need to. I hope their success emphasises that lesson.